The Dark Side Challenge is simple: build a DIY Arduino robot that can autonomously navigate terrain where radio contact is sporadic or non-existent. An example is piloting a rover on a distant planet, and losing connection mid-operation. It may sound tough, but you’d be surprised how many people are making it happen.
The goal is to balance machine intelligence and human input, which has led to some pretty incredible projects. Enter the Dark Side Rover, a robotic kit that teaches computational thinking while also meeting the aforementioned challenge head-on.
The kit comes with everything you need to build and program your rover, including sensors, a camera, connectors, and a custom Arduino UNO clone board. The only thing you need to provide are two 18650 batteries.
The rover connects to a server via WiFi to fetch sequences of commands that are entered through a static HTML file interfacing with the server’s REST end points.
Check out the Hackaday.io page for more details!
